hamburgevons

Hamburgevons is a keyword used by type designers when creating a font. “HAMBURGEVONS” and “hamburgevons” both contain all the basic strokes used in the Latin alphabet. This includes stems, diagonals and rounded strokes, as well stems and rounds. Another word used for the same purpose is “hamburgefons”.

Words like HAMBURGEVONS/hamburgevons, HAMBURGEFONSTIV/hamburgefonstiv, HAMBURGEFONS/hamburgefons and CHAMPION/champion are called key words, test words, or trial words. The general idea is if the key word looks good then the rest of the font will look good too. Besides incorporating the basic letter shapes, key words are also useful for establishing letterspacing.

The use of HAMBURGEVONS, HAMBURGEFONS, and HAMBURGEFONSTIV goes back to the late 70’s and early 80’s at old skool type houses like Linotype, ITC, and URW. Others credit Donald Knuth’s classic The Metafont Book.

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